The Beatles “The Beatles” (EMI; 1968/2009)
In his review of the Beatles’ 1963 LP debut, Please Please Me, Tom Ewing pointed out that whether or not you consider them to be the best band of the rock’n’roll era, they certainly have the quintessential pop band story. Everything they did is deeply embedded in rock’s DNA, and the band’s offhand and ad-hoc gestures have long been established parts of pop music mythology. And of the Beatles’ albums, none– not even Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band– rivals The Beatles as a rock archetype. The phrase, “It’s like their White Album”– applied to records like Prince’s Sign o’ the Times, Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade, the Clash’s Sandinista!, and Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, among many others– has long been accepted critical shorthand. To use the expression is to conjure a familiar cluster of associations: The work in question is large and sprawling, overflowing with ideas but also with indulgences, and filled with a hugely variable array of material, some of which might sound great one day and silly the next. A band’s White Album is also most likely assembled under a time of great stress, often resulting in an artistic peak but one that nonetheless scatters clues to its creator’s eventual demise.
The Beatles, the band’s complex and wide-ranging double album from 1968, is all of these things. It’s a glorious and flawed mess, and its failings are as essential to its character as its triumphs. People love this album not because every song is a masterpiece, but because even the throwaways have their place. Even so, for the Beatles, being all over the place was a sign of trouble. The disintegration of the group as one “thing” is reflected in every aspect of the record, from its recording history (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison sometimes worked in separate studios on their own songs) to its production (generally spare and tending to shapeshift from one song to the next) to the arrangements of the songs (which tend to emphasize the solo voice above all). Visual changes were also apparent. Until The Beatles, the group’s album artwork tended to depict the band as a unit: same haircuts, same jackets, same costumes, same artist’s rendering. But The Beatles was packaged with separate individual color photos of John, Paul, George and Ringo, and they now appear almost forebodingly distinct. All of a sudden, the Beatles neither looked nor sounded like a monolith. So soon after Pepper and the death of manager Brian Epstein in 1967, the writing was on the wall.
But the backstory of The Beatles, while fascinating, is inessential to the album’s appeal. Yes, they wrote most of it in India on acoustic guitar, while on a pilgrimage of sorts in early 1968 to see the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Some of Lennon’s songs, including “Sexy Sadie” and “Dear Prudence”, are based directly on the group’s disillusioning experiences there. But it’s the spectral, floating mood of “Prudence” and Lennon’s playful, faintly condescending vocal in “Sadie” that stay with you. And while we know that Lennon’s new love, Yoko Ono, was a regular presence during the session, much to the rest of the band’s chagrin (McCartney has claimed that she would sometimes sit on his bass amp during a take, and he’d have to ask her to scoot over to adjust the volume), and that her influence on him led to the tape collage “Revolution 9″, the more important detail is the final one, that the biggest pop band in the world exposed millions of fans to a really great and certainly frightening piece of avant-garde art.
In one sense, “Revolution 9″ almost seems like The Beatles in microcosm: audacious, repetitive, silly, and intermittently dull, but also pulsing with life. If the individual Beatles hadn’t been on such a songwriting roll during this time or if the album hadn’t been sequenced and edited so well, The Beatles could easily have been an overlong slog, a Let It Be x2, say. But somehow, almost in spite of itself, it flows. The iffy jokes (“Rocky Raccoon”, “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”, “Piggies”) and genre exercises (Lennon’s aggro “Yer Blues”, McCartney’s pre-war pop confection “Honey Pie”) are enjoyable, even without knowing that another gem is lurking around the next corner.
If The Beatles feels more like a collection of songs by solo artists, they’ve also each got more going on than we’d realized. John is even more hilarious than we’d imagined, wanting nothing more than to puncture the Beatles’ myth (“Glass Onion”), but he’s also displaying a disconcerting willingness to deal with painful autobiography in a direct way (“Julia”). Paul’s getting disarmingly soft and fluffy (“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”, “I Will”), while simultaneously writing the roughest, rawest tunes in his Beatles oeuvre (“Back in the U.S.S.R.”, “Helter Skelter”). George is finding a better way to channel his new Eastern-influenced spiritual concerns into a rock context, while his songwriting toolkit continues to expand (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, “Long Long Long”). And even Ringo Starr writes a decent song, a country & western number with weirdly thick and heavy production (“Don’t Pass Me By”). Listening as the tracks scroll by, there’s a constant feeling of discovery.
But ultimately, the thing about this record is that the Beatles sound human on it. You feel like you’re really getting to know them, just as they’re starting to get to know themselves. Their amazing run between the latter part of 1965 through 1967 made them seem like a band apart, infallible musical geniuses always looking for another boundary to break. Here, they fail, and pretty often, too. But by allowing for that, they somehow achieve more. White Albums come when you surrender to inspiration: you’re feeling so much, so intensely, that you’re not sure what it all means, and you know you’ll never be able to squeeze it all in.